


sanguinaceous

by falter



Category: Adventure Time, Mindless Self Indulgence, My Chemical Romance
Genre: Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, F/M, Pre-Apocalypse, Vampires
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-01
Updated: 2017-01-01
Packaged: 2018-09-08 21:35:56
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,021
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8862997
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/falter/pseuds/falter
Summary: Marceline's a demon on bass guitar. Or rather, Lindsey is.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [akamine_chan](https://archiveofourown.org/users/akamine_chan/gifts).



> Many thanks to my lovely betas. <3
> 
> No familiarity with Adventure Time is necessary for reading, though it isn't like I'm going to discourage anyone from setting out to *gain* familiarity. (hmu if you're looking for episodes that will give you a fast and dirty intro to Marceline.)
> 
> I played slightly fast and loose with canon timelines in a few cases, and carefully observed others. \o? Also, as you might expect, some of the information holes from one canon were filled with canon or canon-based conclusions from the other.

It’s not out of the ordinary at all, the day that it happens. Or at least it’s no more out of the ordinary than any other day. So it’s a pretty strange day, really.

But the point is that it’s strange in a pretty ordinary way. She’s bored, though, and it’s been a while since she went for a really long explore. And a while is exactly how long she likes to wait before seeing what’s new in the world.

And there are always new things. The thing about Ooo, about the whole planet, really, is that it’s still bouncing back. Like a marshmallow, sort of. Like it was squished and it’s slowly expanding back into shape. Though a bit more like you also set the marshmallow on fire and tore a chunk out of it and turned parts of it inside out. Maybe a marshmallow isn’t the right metaphor here. But it’s close enough. 

If Marceline waits long enough between rambles, then the world can surprise her. And the thing about being a thousand year-old half-demon vampire queen is that while she’s never bored, sometimes she gets tired of stirring things up and being the agent of chaos or whatever. 

Well. She doesn’t get tired of that very often. But she still loves surprises. 

It took her four minutes from thinking it had been a while to leaving, and most of that time had been spent deliberating which direction she should go. The sun’s still up, so she heads for the deep shade of the forest. At sundown, she shifts to wolf shape, running fast and hard. By the time the sky is getting light again in the east, she’s long past familiar territory.

She’s also past the sort of landscape that offers much shade, so she needs to find cover. The ground here is glassy and pitted, but there are a few long fissures that look promising, and she slips into mist form to explore them until she find one that leads to caves. The caves are bubbles formed when the ground melted, interconnected and smooth-walled, and they wouldn’t be comfortable for sleeping if she couldn’t float.

Marceline wakes when sunset is still an hour or two away. It isn’t usually a thing she does, sleeping all day. There’s too much she might miss. Today, though, trapped by the sunlight, it was a good enough way to kill time. There’s more to kill, so she slips through the larger caverns into the smaller ones, then from those she goes deeper, and deeper still. As she goes, they get more and more rough-walled, less bubbled and more square, until it’s obvious that she’s in something older than she is. Something from before the war. There’s not much more than a suggestion of intention left, though. At least not at first. 

Then she finds the door. It’s shut tight, and the hinges haven’t rusted away. When she gives it an experimental kick, it makes a hollow metal sound, so there’s no rust there either. Interesting. The knob won’t turn at first, but then it gives all at once, and the rasping noise it makes is loud in the room. 

It’s still stuck closed, though. She pulls at it, and pulls again, and braces her feet against the wall next to it, and strains, and it shifts, just a little. She grins, and pulls harder. Once it’s open a crack - not enough to peer through, but wide enough for a mist to slip through, she goes.

***

The next thing she knows is falling. Not far, more like she’s tripped. Tripping - really tripping and falling down - isn’t something she’s done in centuries, but she still gets her hands under her and twists enough that she doesn’t get hurt. 

It’s loud here. She’s surrounded by people, and she’s outdoors, and she’s landed on gritty concrete, and she can hear music and motors and everything smells so strange and she lifts her head and the people. They’re humans.

***

Marceline isn’t sure how long she stood on the side of the pavement, goggling at the humans, the cars, the electric lights, the full, unruined buildings. 

She knows how this junk works, though. Sometimes it just goes like this - Ooo has some places, not many, but enough, where you can slip into other worlds if you aren’t careful. Worlds where Ooo never grew out of the aftermath of the Mushroom War. Worlds where Ooo is just a little bit different. Worlds where time runs fast or slow, where molecules are bigger or smaller than they are supposed to be. 

She’s the same, from what she can tell. Her skin looks the right shade of demon-grey, and she feels right. She does an experimental hover, and that works too. Some pocket worlds shift you right into who you would have been in them. Or rather, all the pocket worlds she’s heard of do. So this one is different. Or she doesn’t exist here, which is something she decides not to think about. She’ll just explore a little, then she’ll find her way back. 

***

It doesn’t take long before she’s very lost. There’s just so much. So many buildings, so many humans, and so much noise and movement and cars. 

It’s chaotic, and she thinks she’s terrified until she realizes she’s grinning.

***

It starts to rain, a little, and that makes the streets shine with light. It’s beautiful. 

People are looking at her, though - some tolerant and a little amused, and some hostile and mocking. This seems to be a world of human people, and only human people. Her skin and her ears, she got from her Daddy. They’re her birthright, what makes her what she is; but she knows who and what she is when she shifts into mist or demon or bat or wolf. She still knows what she is as she concentrates a little, just enough to make her ears a little more round at the tops, her skin a little more pale. She slips a tiny bit of pink into her skin, even though it makes her hungry, until the grey cast is balanced out, and no one is giving her a second look.

***

The sky is starting to get pale, and the number of humans and cars increases until it’s almost dizzying. She walks in a crowd of them, using the crush of bodies to hide the motion as she sinks her fangs into the bright red scarf dangling over a tall woman’s shoulder, leaving it shining silver when she’s done.

Fed, she feels a moment of satisfied peace before she’s knocked sideways by a big man pushing past her. He hasn’t even noticed her, it’s obvious, and he looks so like her Daddy for a moment. Taking what he wants, doing what he wants, oblivious. She’s so angry, suddenly. Or not suddenly. Perhaps it’s just sudden that she remembers how angry she is at him, as much as they pretend to make peace. She knocks the man down, rolls him over as she drags the long tan coat off his body, and hisses in his face. 

She’s been fast enough that he’s staring up at her, shocked to be on the ground. She lets her eyes go dark with night-fire and grins to show her fangs. “Watch where you’re going, human,” she whispers, grabs his umbrella as well, and slips away into the crowd before he finishes drawing breath to scream.

Well. That was fun.

***

With the umbrella and the coat, she doesn’t need to find shelter. She still needs to find her way back to Ooo, but that can wait a few hours. She still feels weird about how she is the same here, but she’s never seen this many human people before - not even when she was a very little girl with Mommy. 

Really, this is like Mommy’s world. Marceline has seen the Nightosphere, Daddy’s world - and it hasn’t changed at all in her lifetime, so she thinks it’s probably always been the same. It’s always felt very settled, even the first time she visited. But the world her Mommy grew up in and knew was gone soon after Marceline was born. Thinking about it makes her feel ferociously sad and lonely, but it’s still like a missing tooth. She can’t stop poking at it.

She follows people for a while, aimlessly, before she finds a restaurant. It’s funny, how some things are just the same. If it wasn’t for all the humans, and the way that it’s surrounded by other buildings, it could be just like any of the restaurants in Ooo. She sits down in a squeaky booth by the window, and a waitress brings her fries. She upends the bottle of ketchup onto them, and slowly sucks the red away while she eats them. 

***

Turns out, this isn’t a different world at all. 

When the rush of people on the pavement outside the restaurant window slows to a trickle, Marceline started to leaf through a discarded newspaper. There’s a date on it, the way the world used to count years before Ooo. 

It’s 1994. She hasn’t even been born yet. She’s not sure Mommy’s been born yet. Twenty-five years before the first pig bombs fall, starting the Mushroom War.

***

She can’t find the way back. 

Weeks of searching, sleeping in dark corners through the brightest part of the day, and she smells bad, and she’s tired and this is junk. The whole situation is junk.

She’s sitting on the edge of a roof, watching the city lights and being lonely when she gets fed up with it all. 

This is boring. Being sad and angry and tired is for losers. It’s not the way that Marceline, Vampire Queen and heir to the Nightosphere, does things. 

It’s not what her Mommy wanted for her, and not what she would have wanted for her if there’d been no war. She may be over a thousand years old, but she looks seventeen. Or rather, since Peebs’ procedure gave her a little time to grow up without vampirism getting in the way, she probably looks eighteen. 

If she’d lived with Mommy until she was eighteen, grown up with family rather than roaming through ruins with Simon or alone, what would she have done? 

***

She decides to go to art school. There are a few of them in the city, and she visits them all, leaving with stacks of glossy brochures to mull over. She finds a group of human women and men who look the right age, watches them for a while, cleans herself up and raids laundromats for clothes until she thinks she has enough to look like she’s from here and is just away from home. 

It’s easy enough to insinuate herself into the group and convince one of the girls that they’re roommates. 

The hard part turns out to be money. This whole world runs on it, and it’s a terrible system, not like the way that the people of Ooo get what they need at all, with money and other treasure secondary. In the end, she slides into a money machine as mist, and rearranges its impulses until it spits out a pile of bills for her.

She doesn’t want to use her real name, because what if she’s here long enough that she’s born? The idea of stealing her own identity makes her feel a little dizzy. She’s ready for this, though, hours spent in the restaurant over endless plates of fries and ketchup and wedges of strawberry pie, doodling her name until Marceline became Celine became Lena became Linda became Lindsey, and Abadeer became Badeer became Balladeer (which she likes and almost keeps) became Ballado. 

When the man she finds to make her identity papers misspells the name, she shrugs, and pays him anyway. Screw you, Daddy. 

***

Brooklyn is…well, it’s a lot of people, still, but that’s exhilarating. Art school is fun. Sometimes she even forgets that she’s lived a thousand years past the deaths of everyone around her. 

She stumbles, sometimes, of course. She hadn’t thought about what to say when people asked her where she was from, so she says the first pre-war place name that she thinks of. Scotland. But it turns out that Scotland humans talk a little differently than the humans in Brooklyn, or like she does. She fakes a reason to rush away, and by the time she sees the people - the humans - her friends - again, she’s figured out enough that she can explain it away. Born in Scotland; grew up in a little town in Connecticut (no, you haven’t heard of it) with Mommy, whose mama had moved to Scotland from a little town in Gujarat (no, you haven’t heard of it) and whose papa was born in a village in the highlands (you won’t of heard of that, either). She says she’s never met her Daddy. Just in case he shows up, since it’s better to be safe than sorry with him.

Mostly, though, it’s fun. It’s like she gets to be a kid - really a kid - for the first time. She learns to play drums, thinking of Simon, and plays them poorly in his honor. She cuts all her hair off, buzzed down to the skin all over instead of just the sides, lets it grow again, lets her friends talk her into bleaching it, braiding it, straightening it. She has friends.

She even goes out with them during the day; turns out it’s a lot easier to get sunblock in bulk before the war.

***

After college is over, she starts wearing glasses to look a little older before she realizes that she actually does look a little older. Mirrors don’t quite work for her, but some kinds of photos do, and she doesn’t look eighteen any more. She relaxes and watches her skin return to its normal soft grey, feels her ears go back to their natural fierce points; it doesn’t restore her, though. She’s aging, the way she hasn’t since she staked the Vampire King and swallowed his soul. 

***

She gets a job, a series of jobs, making art after a fashion. Designing shop windows, filling them with scenes. If most of them are the things she misses the most from Ooo, well. No one else knows.

***

She gets bored, once she gets used to the idea that she’s aging here, that she’s been successful at fitting into the world and passing for a full human person. 

Really bored. So bored. 

So she scrounges herself a new axe - a metaphorical axe, not an actual axe-shaped bass this time - and sets off to join a band. 

She hates to admit that it wasn't that easy. She's been a monster for nearly a thousand years; she's gotten lazy, pushed her way into anywhere she wanted to be, whenever she wanted to be there. Somebody's stupid enough to try to stop her? Let's see them try.

 But she hasn’t played in a while, and she’s never even tried to be part of a band. It’s different from the bands she’s led, the ones she dominated so much that they were more like an entourage than anything else. It has her a little wrong-footed, how much she wants to be a part of something for a while instead of making her own path and her own music. 

She’s found one that’s perfect, though. Self-proclaimed freaks making noise and being confrontational, shouting about monsters and at monsters in turn. Mocking everyone and daring people to react. Also, their current bassist is leaving. It’s a perfect Marceline-shaped space to inhabit. Or rather, it will be a Lindsey-shaped space. All she needs is to get them to see it.

She dresses carefully, choosing a stereotype to skewer and pulling her hair into pigtails. She paints her lips dark and glossy, concentrating on not biting them, not draining the red away. Not that her lips aren’t okay without cosmetics, but it’s about the aesthetics of the performance. She glamours her skin just a little more pale, her eyes a little more dark, the few tattoos she’s decided to scatter over her arms and legs vivid against her pallor. 

She didn’t expect to be so nervous, though. She flubs the bass line, and can’t quite get back on track. She can feel the band losing their interest in her, polite distance replacing it. She was born to be a ruler; turns out she’s terrible at following.

It's okay. She's still got the smarts that come from living through the aftermath of the Mushroom War alone. She improvises, and when she reaches for fire, it's there. She spits a little red into the air, warm and crackling. 

She feels the room change. Her new friends laugh, thinking she's proven herself full of tricks and resolve rather than centuries of magic and guile. She lets them keep thinking that, and she’s in.

***

The thing she hadn’t really thought about was touring. Lindsey’s had plenty of practice maintaining human skin, small curved ears, and blunt teeth. She’d had to maintain that through years of cheap shared apartments and late night art studio sessions, parties, drunken bar crawls, even a few short-lived romances. 

Turns out, touring is different. There’s nowhere private she can relax, aside from a few minutes in a shower or a bathroom stall. They mostly sleep in the van, and she can keep up the transformation while she sleeps, sure, but it doesn’t leave her well-rested. 

She makes it through the first few, though. They’re a few weeks at a go, and she’s exhausted at the end, but then they all are. Her third tour only has four nights left when Jimmy announces that his girlfriend is playing Indianapolis tomorrow night as well, and fuck it, they’re all getting hotel rooms. 

Turns out Lindsey, Jennifer, and Jimmy’s girlfriend are the only women out of the two bands put together. When one of the guys decides that means Jimmy and Chantal get a room, Jennifer and Lindsey get a room, and the men can crowd into a third, Jennifer arches an eyebrow at her and she doesn’t protest. 

It’s stupid that they get a whole room - two lumpy queen beds - all to themselves after weeks of using whoever was closest as a pillow in the van. But if the guys think it actually makes sense to sleep eight to a room and leave them to it, then Jen’s right. Let them sacrifice.

The show that night is great. The crowd is into it, and Jimmy is peacocking all over the place, even though Chantal’s gig is across town and she isn’t here to see it. She feels great, and even better once she hugs a small contingent of fans wearing homemade MSI t-shirts. Shirts that were red enough she’d been able to see them from the stage, and the kids are so exhilarated from the show they don’t notice the shirts have gone pale grey once she lets them go. 

They do shots with the crew and pack up, and then it’s the hotel. Well, technically it’s a motel. She’s too tired and sated to take advantage of the shower, just tugs the blackout curtains closed and collapses into the closest of the two beds, crawling under the covers while Jen settles into the other.

She’s half-awake from the sounds of people in the other rooms the next morning when Jen flicks on the bedside lamp. Lindsey stretches, long and luxurious, muzzy-headed and feeling lazy until a tendril of unease pokes her awake.

Jen’s being very very quiet. But her breathing is wrong for her to be asleep, and her heartbeat…

It’s when Lindsey realizes she can hear Jen’s heartbeat, skipping fast and panicked, that she realizes what’s gone wrong, and she opens her eyes.

Jen’s sitting up in her bed, arm still stretched out toward the lamp, eyes big in her face and mouth a little open like she’s not sure yet if she needs to scream or speak. 

Lindsey slept too well. The arms crossed under her head are the smooth grey she was born with. Her ears are graceful demon points. And she knows the points of her teeth are just as visible denting her bottom lip as the bite mark is on her throat. 

Jen may not have taken those things in yet, though, because Lindsey also kicked off her covers in the night, and she’s floating a foot above them.

She turns a little in the air, just enough so she isn’t lying down, and Jen tracks the movement. It’s a good sign. Or. It’s a sign of something. Lindsey slides herself lower slowly, and she’s only an inch or so above the mattress when Jen finally meets her eyes, and relaxes all at once. 

“Lyn,” she says, loud in the quiet room. “Lyn. What the hell.” 

Lindsey shrugs a little, unsure where to start, and Jen surprises her by pretty much throwing herself across the gap between the beds to settle next to her, one arm around her shoulders and the other catching her wrist to pull Lindsey’s arm into the lamplight. 

“What the hell, Lyn,” she repeats, and she’s smiling. “You look like you just walked out of anime or something. I’m not dreaming, am I?”

She pinches Lindsey’s arm, and laughs at Lindsey’s protest. “Want to tell me?” She asks, “or - is it a secret?”

Lindsey isn’t sure how much she can tell. She likes Jen, likes her open-hearted take on the world, loves how joyful she looks in her Kitty getup, drumming like there’s nothing better to do in the whole world. But. 

“Yeah. It’s a secret, I guess. It’s just,” she stops a moment to think. “My Daddy is a demon, so I’m half-demon, I guess. It’s easier to blend in if I don’t look different, that’s all.”

“Hmm. I guess,” says Jen. “You could look like this on stage if you wanted, though, I bet Jimmy and Steve would go for it. Don’t worry - I won’t tell them,” she gives Lindsey’s shoulders a little squeeze of reassurance, “just, I think you could, if you wanted.”

That helps, actually. This is going to be okay. “Thanks,” she says, and smiles at Jen’s earnest expression. 

Then Jen quirks an eyebrow. “Is that a vampire bite on your neck? Get that from your Daddy, too?” She leers horribly and Lindsey feels her own eyes go big with horror. 

“No! Arrgh, Jen, don’t be so gross! Fine,” she says, “IalsokilledsomevampiresandgottheirpowersandbecametheVampireQueen.” 

Jen looks a little impressed. “Vampire…Queen?” She wrinkles her nose and looks considering for a minute. “Is that what I smell? Oh no, it’s tour funk.”

Lindsey sighs and pulls out of the half-hug Jen’s had her in. “You smell just as bad. Think of poor me with my vampire senses.” She pulls a clean looking pair of underwear out of her bag on the floor, and a t-shirt she knows she hasn’t worn in at least two days, so it should have had time to air out.

She pauses at the door to the bathroom. “Jen?”

Jen sighs and throws a pillow in Lindsey’s general direction. “We’re fine! Don’t use all the water!”

***

It really is fine. And Jen really doesn’t tell, or treat her any differently. And Jimmy and Steve really don’t find out for another two years, when she tells them.

***

It’s another hometown show. Irving Park, and Lindsey’s pacing side-stage trying not to be nervous. The opening bands are fun, sometimes. This one’s getting the business from the crowd, though, and Lindsey feels bad for a minute - their crowds can be a little hostile. But these guys are eating it up, feeding all that energy right back to the crowd. It’s enough to distract her, and when they start a song about vampires, she’s startled into laughter.

***

She snaps the headstock off a bass that night, again. It’s a good show, and it leaves her wrung out. She just needs a minute, after, on her own, and once she’s packed up her gear, she ducks into the alley behind the venue to put her head down for a minute. It’s just. Sometimes there are so many humans. 

She gets nearly five minutes of quiet before there’s a quiet scuffling noise and something falls over her. 

It’s soft, at least, and it turns out to be the singer from the opening band - the one who’d spat right back at their crowd.

"Sorry! Sorry, sorry, sorry," he says, absently patting at her leg, then getting back on his feet just steadily enough to make it two steps further into the alley before he falls again. 

She’s considering helping him get up when he giggles, coughs, and starts puking. 

When he finishes puking he rolls himself over and smiles at her, big-eyed and crooked-mouthed. She laughs. 

His eyes are big in his face, and he reminds her a little of something: soft-coated prey animals in the forest, maybe. But then he focuses on her - really focuses on her - and she sees she was right but also very, very wrong. His gaze is hard, sharp. Like a bird. Like the sort of birds in Ooo that aren't afraid to take down wolves, if they get hungry enough.

When she goes back inside, the boy from the alley is sitting with her friends and his, but he’s curled into a conversation with his girlfriend, all soft looks and laughter they're not sharing. Shame. He looked like he might be interesting.

 

***

She doesn’t think about the boy again - there are so many people, so many humans in the world. Too many to keep track of. But there he is, on the cover of a magazine left in a dressing room in Cleveland. His funny little teeth have been photoshopped into fangs to rival hers. She shoves the magazine into her bag on impulse. Maybe she’ll look him up again someday. 

***

It’s a good life. She has friends here. It isn’t that she doesn’t miss the friends she has in Ooo, and it isn’t that this world doesn’t get overwhelming. But now she’s got three friends who really do know her, and who she really is - even if they don’t know how she got here, or that, even nearly ten years after she got here, she hasn’t been born yet. 

So it isn’t everything. But it’s interesting. The humans she keeps close are as fierce as anyone she’s met, as self-possessed, and as brilliant. It makes her feel like the war won’t ever come. How could it, with people like this burning so bright, making so much noise? 

And maybe the war won’t come. Maybe this is a different world, truly. 

Maybe the lies she tells herself will get more convincing someday.

***

Another year on, and they’re doing an interview in Toronto for Much Music when she sees it. It isn’t the boy from the alley who she notices first; it’s the Nightosphere on the monitor. It isn’t, exactly, of course. But it’s closer than she’s seen in years, in black and white, with guitars and fanfares and vaguely familiar faces, and that’s when she figures out that it’s him, hair shorn away and bleached the color of old bones. She gets the techs to play the video again for her after the show’s finished taping. 

It gives her a pang, seeing his face in grey tones. She’s not quite sure what to do with the feeling.

***

It’s only a few months later when they get the call that they’ve been tapped to be one of the bands on Linkin Park’s festival tour the next summer. A few weeks later they hear from the guys in The Bled that they’ll be there, too - they’re jerks, but they’re fun jerks. 

It’s a month later that Steve calls her to ask if she’s seen the press release, and whether she remembers that time My Chem opened for them in New York. They talk a while about it. It should be a good tour, even if it sounds like she and Jen will be the only women on either stage. Again.

She googles a little to catch up. Turns out the boy’s sobered himself up, he’s got a comic book debuting at the end of the Linkin Park tour, and he’s engaged. 

So he got a happy ending. It’s nice. It’s going to be nice to see him.

She tells Jen so, over a bottle of wine and bowls of pasta with red sauce. 

Jen cocks her head a little while she listens, and looks considering, and swaps their glasses when Lyn’s wine has no red left in it. 

***

Jen calls her in June to tell her that the boy - Gerard - has broken off his engagement. 

Lindsey isn’t sure why she called just to tell her that.

Tour starts soon, though, and maybe she should get in shape for it. Start running or something. For her health.

*** 

He asks so politely before the first time he kisses her.

He asks her to marry him just as politely, almost six weeks later. 

She says no.

***

Jen finds her as soon as it gets dark, even though Lindsey’s perched on top of one of the gear trucks. 

“Here. Now.” She doesn’t yell it, but her voice carries, and she’s pointing at the ground in front of her in a way that makes Lindsey think arguing is only delaying the inevitable.

She floats down to the ground and crosses her arms protectively in front of her. She can’t help but raise her chin defiantly, even though it makes her feel a bit like she’s a thousand-year-old teenager again. “Do you need to talk to me like a dog?,” she asks. 

Jen sighs. “Lindsey. What happened?”

She doesn’t know what to say.

Jen tries again. “Did he - did the two of you break up?”

She shrugs. Maybe they did. 

Jen jabs her finger into the soft flesh under Lindsey’s chin and pushes it up. Even though Lindsey’s a little taller, it still makes her meet Jen’s eyes. 

“Oh honey,” Jen’s face crumples in sympathy. “Did you tell him who you are, really?”

Lindsey can only shake her head no, and Jen pulls her into a hug while she cries.

***

Lindsey feels like a snotmonster, eyes all swollen and head aching. She hasn’t cried like that since Mommy died. Jen made soothing noises through the worst of it, and now she’s leading her between the buses, keeping her in the shadows and away from the clusters of musicians and crew drinking and laughing. They stop at the bus door, and Lindsey’s so busy being miserable that they’re up the stairs before she realizes it’s the wrong bus. Frank and Mikey are sitting at the table. Frank looks stonily angry, and Mikey just looks stony.

Lindsey tries to tug away from Jen - this is the last place she wants to be - but Jen’s grip tightens. 

“Hey, guys. Who else is on the bus?,” Jen says. 

Frank frowns, then screws his mouth to the side before he answers. “Ed’s in his bunk. Gee’s in the back.”

“Okay,” Jen’s smile is tight. “I want to buy you, and you,” she points at Mikey, “and Ed a beer. And I want to make this idiot,” she shoves Lindsey a little, “tell your idiot some things.” 

Mikey looks nonplussed. Frank, though - Frank’s looking thoughtful. “Hey, Eddie,” he shouts. 

“…yeah?” The answer sounds kind of sleepy.

“Come on, man, get up here, we got someplace else to be.” Frank hauls Mikey up with him and they push past Lindsey. Ed ambles out from the bunks blinking against the overhead lights and squinting a little as he passes Lindsey and Jen.

Jen shoves her toward the back of the bus. 

“We’re locking you two in. Tell him everything. I’m serious, Lyn.” 

Jen tugs her close again, kisses her on the cheek, and whispers a good luck, and then she’s gone.

The bus is really quiet. Maybe Gerard’s asleep. Maybe she can sneak out without talking to him.

Yeah. Maybe she can quit the tour, and the band, and dig a hole to live in for the next thousand years, and then go home. It’ll be like she never left.

She walks to the back of the bus, and knocks on the door.

***

They get married backstage on the final date of the tour, still sticky with sweat and wearing t-shirts with each others’ names on. 

***

When she realizes she’s pregnant, she spends a day thinking before she tells him. She thinks he’ll be happy - surprised, since they hadn’t really talked about it, but happy. But is she happy? The Mushroom War is close. Probably close. Farther away than it was when she was born. Eleven years. 

She goes for a long walk in the woods, and when she gets home, he’s in the kitchen, poking through the delivery menus. He smiles up at her when he sees her, then his face goes grave. “What’s wrong, baby?”

She cracks up at that. The sound of it is sharp and panicky, and before she knows it he’s folded her into a tight hug. She relaxes into it for a minute before she whispers, “I need to tell you what happened to the world when I was very small.”

He kisses her eyebrow and gives her a long look. “Alright. Should we sit down?”

It sounds like a good idea, so she nods and pulls him down with her to the floor. He giggles, clearly not expecting that, and she realizes he probably meant to take her into the living room, but he pulls her close and tucks her back into the angle of the cupboards, fidgeting until they’re both comfortable. 

He’s looking at her with his earnest listening look. It’s too much, so she presses gently at the side of his face until his head is on her shoulder, his breath soft on her neck, before she starts. 

“I was born in 2018, a month before the first action of what we wound up calling the Mushroom War.”

His breath catches, so she stops for a minute. 

He says it softly. “2018?”

***

In the end, they decide it’s worth it. 

Her Mommy never got to see her grow up. Maybe they won’t see their kid grow up either. But isn’t that always the way?

***

They name her Bandit. She’s beautiful.

They take her to explore tunnels and walk cliffs. The three of them spend afternoons walking in forests and driving through the desert. It's like showing her Ooo. Or. Not really. But it's nothing like the way Lindsey spent her childhood, wandering the wreckage of the world the bombs had left. 

She teaches her daughter to put on masks; how to take what she wants; how to be a monster when it suits her aims. Her father spins her stories about heroes. Close enough. 

She whispers secrets to her Beezle about the Nightosphere. Things Gerard never needs to know, but that Bandit can hear with the protection of her demon blood. Lindsey wonders, though, some nights when Gee shakes himself awake from nightmares, if he might not already know more than he should. 

She loves her life, now. She’s raising her daughter to love and be loved, to make art.

***

He makes the Mushroom War into art, of course. In his version, there are bad people left to fight, which is nothing like it really happened. 

But there’s a little girl at the end of the world, all alone. Which is exactly like it really happened. 

***

Things get bad for a while, but they get through it. 

He starts smiling again, and he comes to her full of ideas and with his hair a fresh, shining, delicious red.  
   
She kisses him, nips at his neck until he pulls her tight against him, laughing and tugging at her clothes.

***

There are three years left until the end of the world, or maybe not. Maybe they can stop it. Maybe she can find a way to take them back - forward - to Ooo. 

But ether way, every day will count.


End file.
